2010/12/04 by Anton Kapustin, Kapustin, Anton, Natalia Saulina +1 · 4 citations
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Mathematics #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Quantum Algebra (math.QA) #hep-th #math.QA
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1012.0911
20 pages, latex; 17 jpg figures
arxiv created 2010/12/04 · arxiv updated 2015/03/17
We study surface operators in 3d Topological Field Theory and their relations with 2d Rational Conformal Field Theory. We show that a surface operator gives rise to a consistent gluing of chiral and anti-chiral sectors in the 2d RCFT. The algebraic properties of the resulting 2d RCFT, such as the classification of symmetry-preserving boundary conditions, are expressed in terms of properties of the surface operator. We show that to every surface operator one may attach a Morita-equivalence class of symmetric Frobenius algebras in the ribbon category of bulk line operators. This provides a simple interpretation of the results of Fuchs, Runkel and Schweigert on the construction of 2d RCFTs from Frobenius algebras. We also show that every topological boundary condition in a 3d TFT gives rise to a commutative Frobenius algebra in the category of bulk line operators. We illustrate these general considerations by studying in detail surface operators in abelian Chern-Simons theory.